Little of the oilsands’ carbon dioxide can be captured because most emissions aren’t concentrated enough, the notes say. For efficient capture, there must be a high concentration of CO2 coming out of a smoke stack.

“Only a small percentage of emitted CO2 is ‘capturable’ since most emissions aren’t pure enough,” the notes say. “Only limited near-term opportunities exist in the oilsands and they largely relate to upgrader facilities.”

The Canadian and Alberta governments are spending about $2.5 billion on developing carbon capture and storage, and the oilsands generally come up as the first reason for spending the money.

This doesn’t mean that carbon-capture and storage is a useless technological innovation, just that it’s of negligible use in the oilsands, which are extremely energy-intensive. CCS can be of some help in reducing emissions from upgraders — where sandy tar mined from the ground gets turned into flowing oil — but that’s only part of the production process. The upgraders on the drawing board now, which are likely to get built eventually even if they’re on hold till the economy recovers, are planned to meet pretty high standards, which is a mixed blessing. It’s good that they’re efficient and relatively low-pollution, but they’re not going to be low-hanging fruit in the hunt for emissions reductions.

Affordable electricity is an essential part of protecting consumers and American businesses. During the America’s Power Factuality Tour, our team traveled all over the country to document the places, people and technologies involved in producing cleaner electricity from domestic coal. Our travels brought us to Council Bluffs, Iowa, home of the Walter Scott Energy Center – one of the most efficient coal-based plants in America. This facility generates more than 1,600 megawatts of affordable electricity, which has a positive long-term economic impact on the region—one that includes a Google data facility.

David Reevely

By day, I'm an editor and sometime writer for the Ottawa Citizen. By night, as a personal project, I write here, working out how to be a libertarian and an environmentalist at the same time.
Tips, comments, and corrections eagerly accepted in the comments, or by e-mail.